


i'd call you my darling (but you'd put up a fight).

by lovelyorbent



Series: invictus. [5]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Disability, Discussion of Menstrual Sex, F/M, Insecurity, M/M, Oral Sex, Threesome - F/M/M, Too Much HC, Vaginal Fingering, Yancy Becket Is A Moron, Yancy Becket Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 19:08:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3580635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the alison/yancy/tendo fic no one but me wanted even a little.</p><p>~16,000 words of vignettes, disproportionate amounts of vague descriptions of sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'd call you my darling (but you'd put up a fight).

**Author's Note:**

> i'm just warning you this is awful, but i've been working on it for two weeks and i can't look at it anymore.
> 
> title from 'get it right' by oh honey, mostly because i had to listen to it on repeat the whole time i was writing this to make myself write.

Yancy Becket isn’t even close to Type A, but most men will eventually rise to a challenge to their sexual prowess, and he’s no exception.

And Tendo? Tendo’s okay with that.

Because it has Yancy pressing him into the mattress and kissing him hard, and it’s not like Yancy’s usually the type he ends up in bed with, but he thinks he could develop a thing for being tossed around a little.  Not that Yancy’s violent, he’s not, at all, but he’s strong and he’s showing it off, all broad shoulders and thick arms caging him in, coiled muscle sliding into the spread of his legs again.

There’s a wicked grin, the kind Raleigh can never emulate, pressed into Tendo’s neck as Yancy moves down from his mouth, teeth against the ridge of his collarbone, thumbs stroking over his hipbones.  For someone who’s never been in bed with a man, Yancy sure knows how to work him; he might have had needed some coaching the first time around, but when he’s just kissing, yeah, he’s got this.  He seems to be everywhere at once, and it’s surprisingly easy to just knuckle under, open up, and take it.

He loses one of the heels at some point, because they don’t quite fit right, but the other one stays on, ankle hooked over Yancy’s back.

And yeah, Yancy makes him regret calling him a lazy fuck, even if it does involve a little bit of pinning his hands down, using his weight to immobilize his hips, and stilling there, saying, “Take it back, Choi,” like they’re both five, refusing to move until he capitulates, swearing at Yancy the whole way as he does.

Raleigh avoids his eyes a little after the first Drift test in Gipsy after that one, but Yancy is nothing but nonchalant.

Yeah, they’re good at casual.

 

Alison Tonuchuk is five foot two, a munitions specialist with dark, curly hair pulled back in a headband from her face.  PPDC uniforms don’t come in standard sizes short enough for her, so her pants are always rolled up at the bottoms, shirt hanging open with the sleeves rolled up, an undershirt underneath serving as her real uniform—half the time the PPDC shirt comes off while she’s working on the weapons.

She has upwards of ten piercings that he can _see_ , and he sort of wants to find out if there are any he can’t, but just when he’s about to ask her out, the week after she lands in Anchorage, she gets a call on her phone and answers it with, “What’s up, baby?”

He figures he’ll go for it anyway, because “baby” is a _little_ ambiguous. He’s heard Yancy call Raleigh that, albeit always in a much more sarcastic tone than hers.  Maybe that’s something women call their friends? “Hey, Alison,” he says when she gets off the phone.  “You doing anything tonight?”

It’s Friday, and the Beckets’ll let him skip out of going bar crawling if he’s got a date. Or are they on duty tonight? She looks at him, considering, and he thinks, _Yeah, no boyfriend_ , already high-fiving Yancy in his head. “No, but I could _become_ free,” she says after a moment, raising one eyebrow slowly.  “If you’re going to make it worth my while.”

And yeah, that’s some flirting right there.  Tendo flashes her a grin.  “Absolutely, Miss Tonuchuk. I’d tell you how, but that would ruin the surprise.”  He has no plans. He’s trying to conceal it. “What’re you working on?”

“Gipsy’s plasmacasters. The load time’s too long.”

“True, that. If you want to meet me at the back door at seven?”

Alison shakes her head, and a thick curl of hair falls over her shoulder.  He reaches down to push it back—her hands are busy inside Gipsy’s wrist. “How about you pick me up instead? I live with my boyfriend, off-base.”

Tendo raises his eyebrow, because even if the two of them are in an open relationship or something, he imagines it would be slightly awkward for him to drive by some guy’s house and pick up his girlfriend.  “Are you two—?”

“Not exclusive.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Is that a problem for you?”

“No,” he says, without even thinking about whether or not it’s a problem for him.

It’s not, though. He’s not really a possessive guy; in his experience dating guys, the ones who like to play Neanderthal always ended up being creepy.  Then again, it’s probably a little different getting defensive about the suggestion of another relationship and getting defensive about the knowledge of one.

“Great,” she says. “My phone’s in my back pocket. Put in your number and I’ll text you the address when I have hands free.”

Yancy laughs at him when he tells him about it an hour before the date.  He carefully leaves the boyfriend out of the story, because he’s not totally sure where he stands on that one, yet.  “I can’t believe you didn’t grab her ass when you were getting it out.”

“Disgusting, Becket.” Like he didn’t think about it.

“I know. He’s a pig,” Raleigh says idly, turning a page in the book Yancy’s intermittently reading over his shoulder.

“Your suspenders don’t match your bowtie,” Yancy points out.  “Don’t you have a date look that doesn’t scream ‘massive geek’?”

Tendo rolls his eyes and starts changing out the bowtie, which he already knew about, _thanks_ , Yancy.  “Sure, James Dean, I’ll borrow your slut jeans and leather jacket. Hand ‘em over.”

Yancy’s laughter is as infectious as his brother’s smile.

 

They’ve been going out for a couple or three weeks before Tendo actually meets the famed boyfriend.

Long enough to know that she has three more piercings and only one of those is in her navel. Long enough to have a lot of fun with those piercings.  “Don’t tell my mother,” she says when he teases the one through her nipple with his teeth, and he laughs into her ribs.

The Boyfriend—who has a name, but both of the Beckets just call him The Boyfriend and it’s sort of stuck in his head—is six feet tall, which is four inches taller than Tendo, and as broad across as Zeke Amarok, which is truly intimidating, because Tendo is just not built that way.

Not that he’s helpless, because he’s not, but his odds are still iffy if it came down to a fight.

He’s standing on the doorstep and the guy is glaring at him over the doorjamb, and Alison has yelled, “Just a minute!” and is running around in the background grabbing her bag, and it’s just… incredibly awkward.

“Hi,” Tendo says, and The Boyfriend just crosses his arms across his chest and squares his jaw, keeps on glaring.

He’s guessing maybe this _not exclusive_ thing is mostly Alison’s jig, not this guy’s, but it’s not like they’re sneaking around, because Alison comes to the door and tugs her boyfriend’s head down to give him a kiss goodbye, then presses into Tendo’s arms and kisses him hello. “See you later, Martin,” she says, and tugs him by the arm into the night.

If looks could kill, Tendo is pretty sure he’d be on fire: he can feel Martin’s eyes on his back burning into his spine as they’re walking towards the car.  “Wow, he’s… big?”

“Not really,” Alison muses, and he about chokes.  “But he’s a nice guy. Really funny.  And he’s always there for me, you know?”

“Yeah,” he says, even though he doesn’t really know.  “Is it ever weird that you date other people and he doesn’t?”

“Oh, he does,” she replies. “He’s fine with it, usually. He just doesn’t like you.”

“That’s comforting.”

“It doesn’t really matter if he likes you or not,” she points out.  “It matters if I do.”

“No threesomes, huh?” He’s trying to be funny, but he’s floundering a little, and he thinks it shows.

She laughs, though, low and ringing.  “No. He said he’d be fine with it, but only as long as the third was a woman.  So I told him I was only fine with it if the third was a man, because I think turnabout is fair play.”

Tendo raises his eyebrows and parks in front of the restaurant.

Dropping her back off at The Boyfriend’s is actually significantly more awkward than picking her up, because the kiss she gives him is so long the guy actually clears his throat to get them to part ways.

At two the next morning, Knifehead hits the Miracle Mile off Anchorage.

 

Tendo visits Providence Alaska Medical Center four times to see Yancy while he’s in his coma, mostly because Raleigh can’t go and is going crazy not knowing what’s going on with him. Not that he’ll say it—the only word he’s said since he woke up from his own three-day sleep is _Yancy_ , and Tendo’s not even sure that’s true, since he hasn’t heard it himself—but it’s pretty obvious from the way he won’t sleep, the way he keeps looking to his right, the way he jolts upright every time his door opens and then wilts when it’s not his brother.

He hates the visits.

Hates the visits to both of them, because talking to Raleigh when he doesn’t talk back is exhausting and heartbreaking—the kid has hollow eyes and a haunted look on his face, and Tendo can admit this about himself: he’s not man enough to handle it. All the raw emotion isn’t really his territory.

But mostly he hates his visits to Yancy, because even if Raleigh isn’t talking, he is at least still visibly _alive_.  Yancy’s just—in a _coma_ , he’s not even moving, and all Tendo can think about when he visits is that if and when he wakes up, he’s going to feel like shit about the shape he’s in, that missing leg.

And yeah.

He does.

When he comes back to the Shatterdome, he’s strung out on morphine half the time, in eight kinds of brace and still barely able to move.  Trying to be positive for Raleigh, who leaves his bedside only when Yancy tells him to, but obviously more tired and fucked up over this than he’ll let on. It’s probably because he’s high all the time that he’s being so obvious, because Tendo knows from almost five years of dealing with the Beckets that usually, he’s better at pretending for his brother.

He gets angry, a lot, not at other people, but at himself, and it’s frustrating and stupid and Tendo wants to tell him sometimes that he’s being an idiot, that he’s entitled to have trouble doing some things after he gets taken to hell by a kaiju.

But instead he tells Alison, because _Alison_ won’t kick him out of the room for cutting in on Yancy’s helpless fury. She knows the Beckets in passing because they made sure to talk to everyone who works on Gipsy, and liked them, because really, almost everyone liked them, but she takes Tendo’s side on this one, thinks Yancy’s expecting too much of himself.  “Thanks, babe,” he says, and she snickers, tugs lightly on his ear.

“ _Babe_?”

“What, is that your other boyfriend’s thing?”

She rolls her eyes.

 

It’s not that Alison doesn’t love her boyfriends, either of them.  She does.  It’s just that she’s never been able to be happy with only one person, there’s always something _missing_. The “something” varies, but it’s always there.  And eventually, it wears down her relationship with her partner.  It’s not Martin’s fault, it really isn’t, and it’s not Tendo’s, either, or the guys before either of them, it’s just how she is.

And she’s learned pretty fast that when guys have issues with that, she needs to drop them like rocks. Because she always ends up miserable, with that missing piece that makes her unhappy even when she’s with someone she knows she loves.

And some guy she might maybe love someday just isn’t worth being miserable.

Martin gets a job in New York and she can’t leave Alaska and they decide, together, that it’s best if they don’t try and do long-distance.  He promises to call occasionally and they both know he probably won’t and he gets on the plane and she wishes him luck and then spends the rest of the day feeling like someone’s torn out a piece of her soul.

After a week, it’s more of a dull ache, and Tendo’s surprisingly good about it, doesn’t do those annoying things that some of her boyfriends have done when she breaks up with one of the others and acts victorious or tries to tell her he’ll be enough.

It’s not about _enough_ , it’s not because they’re not _enough_.

He just lets her sit on his lap and rest her head against his shoulder in the apartment that she’s keeping because she doesn’t want to live in the Icebox, strokes back her hair while she’s pretending to watch a movie.  It’s about the sweetest thing he’s ever done for her; usually he was the boyfriend she could go out to bars and talk about work and try weird things in bed with and Martin was the one who held her when she needed holding, but he’s pretty good at cutting his usual shit and giving her what she needs, when push comes to shove.  “I love you,” she tells him, and he doesn’t freeze up like she half-expects, just ruffles her hair.

“I know.”

He’s quoting Star Wars.

She’s just finished crying on his shoulder and he’s quoting Star Wars.

She can’t believe this. “I’m going to kick you off this couch, Choi.”

“And into the bed?”

“You’re skeezy,” she tells him, and he kisses her forehead, shrugging the shoulder her head isn’t on.

“You love me.”

“You know, _apparently_.”  She pinches his nipple through his shirt, hard, glaring at his dumb sideburns as she does, and he twitches.

“Ow! I love you too?”

“Is that a question?”

“After that?” he says, hand covering his right pectoral, expression wounded, “Yeah.”

 

Yancy always asks about Alison when Tendo comes to see him, how she’s doing, even though he’s had maybe two conversations with her, total.  Tendo’s not sure whether it’s his bizarre way of looking after him or whether it’s his way of being jealous, and he sincerely hopes it’s the first, because it would be seriously awkward if he missed Yancy catching feelings for him halfway through their casual sex life.

He doesn’t really want to have to ask, so he just has a different clever answer every time, but not too clever, because every time Yancy tries to laugh, he immediately stops and looks like he wants to die.

That’s probably the broken ribs.

Not much of him escaped unscathed.

“How’s—how’s Alison?”

“You asked that yesterday, Yancy.”

“D—did I?” Yancy tries to smile, but it only half works—his facial muscles still don’t obey him all the time. “Must b—be the brain damage.”

“You can’t blame being an idiot on that forever,” Tendo informs him, because Yancy seems to react better to being insulted than to being treated like a normal human being, and he chooses not to examine that too closely and tries not to feel too guilty about it. “Your brain damage wasn’t that bad, cowboy.”

Having Raleigh sitting silently in the corner is unpleasant; before he would always engage when the two of them were snarking back and forth, playing to whichever side he’s feeling like: the side that annoys Yancy or the side that makes Yancy grin at him, it’s all centered around Yancy.

Tendo doesn’t really want to think about what would have happened to the kid if his older brother had actually checked out off the shore of Anchorage.

It wouldn’t have been pretty, that’s all he knows.

 

Alison quits about the same time Raleigh does, because even though Gipsy isn’t the only Jaeger in the PPDC’s wheelhouse that needs a munitions specialist, the others all mostly _have_ one already, and besides, this was never what she wanted to do with her whole life, this was just something that came natural after getting her degree in aerospace engineering around the time the PPDC started recruiting, an easy job in a shitty job market.  What she _wanted_ to do was work on spaceships.

She gets a job with Anchorage Aerospace and gets her wish.

She has to be out at Kodiak Island at the launch facility every so often, but the company pays for the hotels, so it’s a pretty sweet deal.  Tendo gags at all the physics involved, but he’s spending most of his nights at her place now, so she tells him he officially doesn’t get to complain or he’ll have to sleep on the couch.

He retaliates by talking in computer technicalities until he remembers that she knows most of them and can figure out the rest eventually, because coders are not the single most creative bunch of people when it comes to naming their shit.

Then he pouts. It’s kind of cute.

She kisses him on the forehead and says, “I’m going out with a guy I met at the Kodiak Island facility next weekend,” waits for him to flinch or look disappointed or something, the way all the other guys have, even the ones who accept it.

“Be safe,” he says instead, and flashes her a grin, crossing his ankles on her coffee table and tapping away at his tablet with the hand that isn’t holding his cigarette.

She can’t stop smiling. “You know I always am.”

Then she kisses him, tasting smoke.

He texts her about noon Sunday, asks how the date went.

_he took the boyfriend thing weird_

_sucks_

_yeah but its not like im not used to it_

_well, fuck him.  men are stupid_

She laughs into the hotel sheets she’s lying face down on.

_im pretty sure you are very much a man_

_yes, and i have also dated men.  we are all very stupid_

Maybe Tendo Choi wasn’t such a bad decision in the world of workplace dating, the way Martin had been sure he would be.  She thinks about emailing him and saying _I told you so_ , but she thinks that wouldn’t come off as friendly.

 

Initially, the weekends Yancy is in Anchorage, he spends at the ‘dome, one day with his various appointments, one day with his friends.  After a while, though, Tendo brings him home for the second afternoon every other weekend, and Alison is struck by how much, physically, he’s changed. He’s thinner, looks taller than he used to because he’s become less broad, but then again, everyone looks tall to her.  There’s a slim, white scar at his hairline on the left side.  He lists to one side, stands at an odd angle, and can’t walk for very long until he has to sit down again.  Dresses in fatigues all the time, wears his hair a little longer so he looks a little more different from his brother, a little neater, a little older.

He stammers, which she’d known, from Tendo’s accounts, but it’s a little different actually seeing it, like an audible representation of his fall from grace.

“C—could you not,” he says, when Tendo reaches for a cigarette, “W—while—while I’m here?”

“Oh. Forgot,” her boyfriend replies, like they’ve had this conversation before, and puts the pack away again. “You two want to go out?”

“I’m t—telling you,” Yancy answers, “I c—can last a night at the—at the ‘dome b—by myself if you two w—want to go out.”

Tendo and Alison both make the same face in unison.

She’s deciding if she still likes Yancy Becket.  For sure, he’s not whiny, but he’s stubborn and obviously kind of a moron. And he used to be charming, but now he’s mostly just… pitiful, not that she’d ever say that to him, but he’s so obviously putting on a brave face over whatever he’s actually feeling, and she can’t help but feel sorry about that.

“Don’t say that to him, he’ll burn you at the stake,” Tendo tells her when she voices this opinion after Yancy has flown home.

“He’ll fall over trying.” It’s not that she’s careless of his disability, it’s the fact that he seems to be treating his disability as a point of self-hatred that rubs her the wrong way.

She’s got a little brother, twelve years old, who’s got cerebral palsy and is going deaf. So part of her understands, because _he_ isn’t very confident either. But another part of her wants to slap Yancy Becket right across his handsome face for all the self-pitying she suspects he’s doing in the back of his head, because—and she knows therapists cover this, because she’s been to her brother’s sessions—he’s just a human being with an extra set of challenges, there’s nothing inherently about his condition that makes him worthy of pity.

Which, she supposes, is ironic, because she does pity him.

Even if it’s not actually about his leg.

“He’s a good dude,” Tendo continues.  “He’s just, you know. Not used to not being how he used to be. He offered up their house if you need somewhere to stay when you’re on Kodiak Island, so you don’t have to pay for hotel rooms, by the way.”

She takes him up on it, just because she wants a read on him, and it turns out that watching him with his brother kind of helps.

Raleigh doesn’t appear much when she’s in the house, just—leaves every morning after making breakfast and comes back every night, and never says anything to her, makes dinner silently and then disappears.  Sometimes hangs out with Yancy in the living room, but never really seems to speak to him then, either, just leans into his side and reads books over his shoulder.

All of Yancy’s self-pity fades when Raleigh’s in the room, replaced with something more important, like he vanishes into being what Raleigh needs for a few hours a day, and that’s when he appears to be happiest.

Yeah, Yancy Becket is an idiot.

But Tendo’s right.

He’s a good guy.

And he’s hard not to like, in the end.

 

 _hey_ , the text reads, _do you want to have a threesome with a hero of the kaiju war_

Alison stares at her phone for a good minute.

_what_

They have actually talked about a threesome, because Tendo has no qualms about having sex with another man or another woman, surprise, surprise.  They’ve even, briefly, talked about Yancy Becket being part of that threesome, although Alison hadn’t really been serious about that, because the man is a veritable minefield of body issues, the way he’s always wearing baggy clothes and multiple layers and trying to hide his gait, even on that new leg of his that helps him, at least, move somewhat more smoothly.

_yancy needs to get laid.  thought you might want in on that_

She glares at her phone, because she had thought that discussion had been something private, but before she can reply, another text comes through.

_shit nvmd i fucked up_

Then, barely a second later,

_how do u deal with crying ppl?_

Oh my god. Alison knows how to deal with crying people, but she doesn’t know how to deal with her stupid boyfriend. How do you make someone _cry_ while proposing a threesome?

_what did you DO???????????_

_i need assistance_

She hops a taxi to the Anchorage Shatterdome and finds him waiting to get her through security, looking awkward and confused.  “You,” she tells him, flicking his nose, “are an idiot, Choi, and you’re sleeping on the couch for a week.”

“Wh—”

“Please shut up,” she says, and leads him to his quarters.

Yancy’s gone, and he doesn’t return for the rest of the night.  Probably they could find him, but they decide, together, that it’s best to just let him stay lost.  “Besides,” Tendo says, “He’s Yancy Becket, there’s no way he’s not going to sleep tonight.”

This doesn’t mean much to Alison at first, but then she remembers the elder Becket leaning against walls with his head knocked back, snoring softly while his brother talked with someone, and yeah, probably.

His jacket’s gone, though, so he’s probably outside.

And despite herself, she worries.

 

Thing is, Yancy’s not exactly a blushing virgin to threesomes, not even devil’s threesomes, because he firmly believes he can’t be sure he doesn’t like something unless he’s tried it at least twice, but it’s a little different when it’s your second best friend and his girlfriend, and it’s a little bit different now, and it’s a little bit different when he’s so genuinely physically fucked up he doesn’t think it’s even possible to have sex.

He realizes he never asked Mako about whether his leg can handle sex or whether he ought to take it off during, and vows _never_ to ask Mako about this.

He realizes he never really thought he’d be having sex again, and that is a depressing thought, because he really _likes_ having sex. Or, he guesses, liked. Who even knows, now. What with all the things about him that Knifehead messed up, he wouldn’t be surprised by anything, at this point.

He realizes the idea of them seeing him naked makes some part of him feel nauseous and uncomfortable.

He realizes these are really stupid realizations, but he’s been thinking about this for way too long, now, and everything’s starting to get cyclical in his head like that. “Stop thinking, Yance,” Raleigh tells him, looking at him across the table.  “You’re making _my_ head hurt.”

“I c—can’t,” he says idly. “And I think—think that’s j—just your hangover.”

“My hangover went away by nine.  Penny for your thoughts?”

Right, they’re sharing and caring now, that was Yancy’s rule.  He guesses he can’t just apply it to Raleigh, has to add a little reciprocity into the mix.

“Nothing,” he says anyway, then kicks himself because Raleigh is his brother and he can tell him anything. And he should. Because he told Raleigh to tell him everything.  So he continues, “Just… Tendo and I had k—kind of a misunderstanding.”

Raleigh’s eyebrow creeps up. “Yeah?  What about?”

“Sex.” Yancy clears his throat and glances at Raleigh’s face.  The kid looks halfway between laughter and confusion.  “It’s a long story.”

“It have anything to do with Alison?  Because I thought you and him stopped doing that when he started dating her.”

“Not really,” Yancy says, even though, actually, he’s pretty sure the last time they fucked was before Alison.  “We stopped b—because I went and broke myself.”

Raleigh now looks slightly judgmental. “You’re not broken, Yancy.”

“Ugh, n—not you, too.”

He’s so _sick_ of everyone constantly trying to cheer him up when he doesn’t really need cheering.

“But don’t let him run around on Alison.  She’s nice.”

“Have y—you even said five w—words to her while—while she’s been over?  It w—wasn’t like that, anyway.”

Raleigh’s eyes narrow, and Yancy recognizes the considering look from his own face, figures that his brother is reading the story right off his face.  “— _seriously_? Both of th—you said no, didn’t you?”

Yancy throws a small piece of chicken at him, because now that he can’t noogie the kid without a _process_ of standing up, throwing things is his recourse. _Nope_ , he almost wants to say, _I cried instead, but that was mostly about you, kid_.  “I said ‘not tonight’.”

Raleigh gapes. It’s kind of horrifically endearing. “Yancy!“

“I’m not doing it.”

“Why not?”

“Because… I mean, d—do you really think I can—can even fuck like _this_?” He gestures vaguely at himself, and Raleigh flinches a little, face starting to withdraw, and then visibly tries to rally and points his fork at his brother.

Getting drunk last night was good for him, Yancy thinks.

“If people in wheelchairs can do it, I’m pretty sure you can.”

“How d—do you know people in wheelchairs—?”

“Don’t ask.” This time Yancy throws half a grape, but Raleigh catches it in his mouth like he’d known it was coming. “If that’s your only objection, Yance, it’s a shitty one.  Let’s hear what else you got.”

 

Alison texts Yancy on Wednesday.

_hey_

_Hey._

It’s a very noncommittal response, and if he were here, she’d probably smack his arm, or maybe his face, whichever happened to be closest.

Probably the arm, since he clocks in at nine inches taller than her.

_howre you feeling_

_I’m fine.  Raleigh’s doing a little better. Actually got him to talk for real; thank your boyfriend for me._

He’s always talking about Raleigh, always gives Raleigh’s report when they ask him how he is—she’d think it was evasive and annoying, but she’s pretty sure how Yancy is heavily depends on how his brother is, so she gives that to him, at least. But she’s also pretty sure he knows what she was talking about.

_you should have let us see you off he was worried when you didnt come back_

Yancy’s response doesn’t come for fifteen minutes.

_Sorry. I didn’t think about it. Tell him I’m sorry, too, then._

_tell him yourself you big baby_

This time the response is a little yellow weeping emoticon, and she wants to not find it a little cute that a man in his mid-twenties still uses emoticons as sentences, but it’s kind of a struggle.

_he told me what happened and hes right you are being a fucking idiot if you think sleeping with you is the equivalent of martyring ourselves on the cross_

It wasn’t even her offer. She probably wouldn’t have made it, if it were up to her, but—well.  Tendo’s different from her past boyfriends.  And if this is what he wants— _who_ he wants—and they’ve both made it clear they’re open to a three-way relationship instead of her just having two or three separate ones, she has to give serious consideration to Yancy Becket being that third.

She’s never been the hesitant one about a relationship before.  It’s odd.

Yancy’s reply takes a long time.  She checks her watch, wondering if he’s blowing her off with mounting annoyance, and then realizes he’s probably in class.

_Didn’t know biblical allusion was your poison, Tonuchuk._

_dont change the subject becket_

He thinks he’s so subtle.

_Yeah. I’ll talk to him. But I’m not sure how good of an idea this would be._

_neither am i_

_but he wants you_

_and i figure its worth a shot so if you agree please put him out of his misery and talk about it like adults_

_Okay_ , is Yancy’s reply.  _Will do, Alison.  Sorry for this weekend._

_stop apologizing_

_Before I talk to him, are you on board with this?_

_if i wasnt you would be very aware_

_youre hot shit becket remember when you used to know that_

He doesn’t answer.

 

“So,” Yancy says to him, two weeks later, “w—we should talk.”

Somehow, despite knowing that Yancy is actually very competent at talking about his feelings and always has been, Tendo is not expecting him to say that.  And he uses the wrong phrase, _we should talk_ , which is the breakup sentence and they both know it.

He sighs and keeps his tablet up, because he doesn’t want to have to face this head-on, and if that makes him a coward, then paint him yellow and let the minstrels sing his disgrace, because he’s already pretty much lost Raleigh, losing Yancy too is going to suck epically.  He might be a social animal, but he doesn’t have enough friends that he doesn’t feel it when they leave.  “You sure about that?” he asks casually, waving a cup of coffee with the hand not holding the tablet, not looking at him.  “I thought we were doing pretty good not talking about it, actually.”

“Let’s g—go see Alison,” Yancy sighs, crossing his arms over his chest.  “C’mon, Choi, up and—up and at ‘em.”

“Yancy, we don’t have to—”

Yancy sighs again, then stumps over to him and snaps his suspenders lightly, the way he always does when he’s trying to be affectionate but can’t figure out how to be without ruffling Tendo’s hair the way he always does Raleigh’s.   “Yeah, we do.  Otherwise she’ll e—em—emasculate me and I’ll never g—get laid again.”

He’s obviously trying to joke, but they both just sort of grimace at it.

But it does ease Tendo’s momentary disquiet.

“All right,” he says, “let’s go see Alison.  Are you too high to drive? I have work I need to finish.”

Yancy laughs, somewhat sheepish.  “OxyContin.”

“Shit, that bad?”

“That’s what Raleigh said, b—but yeah, there was some—some turbulence on the p—plane ride that fucked with my back.”

They text Alison and take a taxi, and Tendo finishes his work.  Yancy mostly stares out the window.

When the three of them are finally sitting around Alison’s coffee table, Yancy in the chair across from the window, Alison stretched out on the couch, and Tendo sitting cross-legged on the floor, there’s a long moment of silence until Alison says, “ _Men_ ,” and rolls her eyes.  “You want to try this, Yancy?”

Yancy opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again, and this time it’s Tendo’s turn to roll his eyes, but they both wait for him to actually talk, because as much as they suspect it’s just him being a dope that’s keeping him from saying anything, it could also be the apraxia, and neither of them want to interrupt him while he’s trying to force out words.  “See, I’m n—not really sure what ‘this’ is.”

“Sometimes,” Alison says, “even when a man and a woman love each other very much, they still want to fuck other people—”

Tendo has to stifle his laugh with a hand, and Yancy looks very much like he wants to shake his head and leave the room in disgust.  “W—wow. Very creative. So we’d be all c—casual, then?”

Alison and Tendo look at each other, and shrug.  “I mean,” he starts, and then doesn’t finish.

His girlfriend picks it up, bless her heart.  He’ll have to do something nice for her later.  Flowers. Breakfast in bed. Sexual favours. “Not necessarily? That’s up to all of us.”

“Open relationship,” Tendo says, gesturing between the two of them.

“We haven’t tried this before,” Alison adds.  “Well, I have, but not with him.”

She jerks her thumb at him, and he looks at her like she’s grown a second head, because she had totally neglected to inform him of this.  “How’d—how’d that work out for you?” Yancy asks, leaning back in his chair.

He doesn’t sound challenging, he sounds genuinely curious.  “They got jealous of each other and one of them ended up leaving,” she says, raising her eyebrows.  “Then I broke up with the other.  So, not so well.”

Tendo looks at Yancy the same time Yancy looks at him.

Neither of them is really sure whether they are actually the allegoric pair in this situation. “Uh,” Yancy continues, awkwardly, “So are you and—and I the two of them?”

Alison glances at Tendo. “No,” she says simply.

“And you two are on b—board with this?”

“We’re on board with _trying_ it,” Alison clarifies. “I’m not secretly in love with you, Becket, and I’m pretty sure Tendo’s not either.”

And yeah, he’s not, really. So he doesn’t correct that. “But we do both like you?”

Yancy laughs—it doesn’t sound anything like how he used to laugh, it’s like he’s struggling to get this, too, out of his mouth.  “Well, fuck, this is—is awkward.  I’m madly in love with you both.  It’s t—tearing me apart. I bought r—roses and ever—everything and now my heart is broken.”

Tendo chokes on laughter, and Alison throws a pillow at Yancy’s head.

“Send my b—brother my body when I poison myself,” Yancy continues, ducking it, “he’ll know what to—what to do with it.”

“Oh my god, Becket, shut up,” Tendo manages.

“—bury me in roses—”

“What, the ones you bought for us?” Alison asks, now struggling to rein in her own amusement even as she looks for something else to lob at his head.

“That sounds poetic,” Yancy replies, thoughtfully.  “’If music b—be the food of—of love, play on, give me ex—excess of it, that—that’—f—fuck me, I don’t remember the rest.”

And then all three of them are laughing.

 

They don’t actually do anything for a couple of weeks, for one reason or the other—Alison’s on Kodiak Island the next weekend Yancy is in Anchorage, Tendo has the flu the time after that, and the next two times after _that_ , Yancy has two sprained wrists in braces because he’d changed out prosthetics and had to catch himself on them after he’d fallen at the shift in his balance.

Doesn’t mean they don’t think about it.

“You want him in you?” Alison murmurs into his ear as she’s settling herself onto him, back arched as she slides down, thighs bracketing his hips, and it’s hard for him to reply coherently, because she’s been teasing for almost an _hour_ , but _whatever_. He groans into her neck instead of answering, takes her by the hips and presses open-mouthed kisses against her collarbone, but that only seems to spur her on as she starts riding him. “That’s how you two used to fuck, huh?”

Tendo doesn’t say anything, just presses up into her and skates his hands up her sides to thumb across her nipples as she starts circling her hips over him. “Talk to me, baby,” she says, and the request barely registers with him at first.

He really, really does not have anything hot to say to that, but he figures if he runs out of things to say he might as well make things up, because he suspects she’s not actually aiming for accuracy if she’s questioning him in the middle of sex. “—fucked me in heels the first time,” he says, and she shivers in his arms, which gets him smiling into her collarbone.  “Still have them.”

She laughs, and he’s pretty sure his world whites out for a moment, because all of those little muscles fibres surrounding him just _shake_ , and Jesus Christ.  “I thought you meant _he_ was wearing heels,” she explains, but he doesn’t really hear her, he’s trying too hard not to lose control, make this good for her.

“Feet like that? No way.”

She laughs again, and the whimper he lets out is entirely undignified and only makes her laugh harder, quickening her pace.  “Well, you know what they say about big feet,” she says into his ear, and the fact that they are discussing his best friend’s feet is so profoundly unsexy that it helps him back from the edge.

“You will not be disappointed.”

“Hmm?”

“’Beckets are built big’,” he mocks, and drops a hand to rub against her clit even as she’s laughing again.

He has a feeling he’s going to have to finish this with his mouth.

 

When Yancy is actually introduced to the equation, it’s kind of awkward, because he has no idea who he’s supposed to be paying attention to.  And when he kind of laughs and refuses to take his shirt off when Alison slips her hands under it, the two of them sit back on their heels almost in unison and cross their arms over their chests.

“Okay, ground rules,” Tendo says finally, ticking them off on his fingers, “Mine are 1.) Condoms, always, for everything, 2.) Everything stops if somebody says stop, and 3.) No lying back and thinking of England.  You got that, Captain America?  You have something to say, say it.”

Alison lays a kiss on her boyfriend’s neck.  “Those, and also, 4.) This is a no shame zone.  Are we clear, boys?”

Yancy thinks her eyes are burning through his skull.  “Yes?”

There’s a minute where they don’t say anything, and Alison sighs.  “You clearly have a problem, Yancy.  3.) means start talking.”

Yancy is very much tempted to grab his crotch and say, _yeah, and I thought you two were going to help me take care of it_ , but he thinks that’s a joke best saved for when he’s actually sporting a problem.  So, instead, he’s honest.  “I’m g—going to keep my shirt on, if that—that’s all right with y—you two.”

Alison shifts to sit down properly and pulls her own off over her head.  “We don’t care about your scars,” Tendo tells him.  “That was kind of the point of this.”

Yancy grits his jaw, feeling stupidly vulnerable for someone who’s still fully clothed in a bed with two people in varying states of undress.  “M—maybe _I_ don’t want to look at ‘em,” he says, trying to sound flippant.

Alison takes control of the situation after another moment of no one speaking, the way she always does when the two of them aren’t sure what to say to each other. “Are you still good, Yancy?”

“Yeah.”

“If I get naked and sit on your face how are you going to feel about that?”

Silence reigns again, but this time it’s less awkward and more charged.  From a little behind Alison, Tendo whispers, “ _Mother Mary_ ,” like he can’t get enough of her taking charge and bluntly solving their problems. Yancy, on the other hand, is pretty sure he looks like he’s been hit in the face with a brick. “I c—could get behind that,” he says, sounding slightly choked.

At least he knows he’s good with his mouth.

Then he glances at Tendo, who raises his eyebrows.  “Great,” Alison says to him and then exchanges a look with her boyfriend. “You can undress me and then blow him. If,” and now she turns to Yancy, “You’re fine with having your pants off.”

“Yep,” he replies, because really, what else can you say to that?

“Alison gets what she wants in bed,” Tendo tells him as he’s standing up to pull her back into his chest, unbuttoning her jeans from behind and sliding them down her hips.

“I can tell,” Yancy replies idly as he watches them, leaning back on one hand to watch them. Alison’s gorgeous—not his usual type, which is leggy brunettes, but the two of them standing there together make a pretty picture, Tendo bent to kiss her neck as she stretches against him, all swooping curves and smooth skin.  She has a piercing in her bellybutton, and he puts getting his mouth on it on the to-do list.  She’s shorter than he usually goes for, but it’s kind of cute, the way she fits so easily into Tendo’s body. He’s a little endeared by their coupledom for a moment, then realizes that’s a weird thought to have, since he’s about to have sex with them.  She steps out of her trousers and Tendo unhooks her bra, and she has great tits, really, and little barbells through her nipples, and the way that gets him a little hot makes him remember he’s still wearing his prosthetic.  “Oh, fuck.”

“What?” Alison asks, immediately, and Tendo’s hands fall off her hips where he’s starting to inch down her panties.

“Nothing, just—” Suddenly he’s laughing.  “—there’s n—no sexy way to remove a _leg_.”

 

“So did you,” Raleigh says when Yancy comes home, the same way he has every other weekend since Yancy utterly failed to bring up a reason not to sleep with Alison and Tendo that didn’t involve his shitty self-esteem.  “You know?”

Usually, Yancy says something like, _nose out, dickhead,_ or _where did you get this gossip gene? Jaz and I don’t have it_ , or _please stop being this interested in my sex life, kiddo_. Today, he throws his hat at his brother and hobbles towards his bedroom to put his overnight luggage away. “What, am I limping?”

“You’re always limping,” Raleigh says, and then audibly claps his hand over his mouth.

Yancy laughs, though, and it’s like he can feel Raleigh relaxing behind him.   “Sure am,” he replies, pretending this doesn’t hit him hard some days.

“So you bottom, huh?” He can hear Raleigh’s grin in his voice, and it can only indicate that he thinks he’s hilarious.

Tossing his bag onto the bed, he turns around and throws a pen from his bedside table at his brother, who has come to stand in his doorway.  “Spoken t—truly like someone who has n—never had his dick in any—anything but his own hand.”

If they’re a little more candid than some brothers are, it’s probably because they’ve been walking through each other’s heads, they’ve _been_ each other having sex. There are no secrets from the Drift.

Raleigh throws his pen back, hitting him dead in the back of the neck.  If that’s what he was aiming for, Yancy is proud of him. Yancy’s proud of him anyway, but that was a killer throw.  “But you’re all good, right?”

Yancy glances back at him.

Smiles, helplessly.

“I’m fine, kiddo.”

Something in Raleigh seems to relax.  “So I don’t have to threaten your best friend with death, huh?”

“I d—don’t think you can actually threaten yourself,” Yancy says, because it is a slightly less corny way of saying _you’re my best friend_.  “And—and no, you don’t have t—to threaten Tendo either. Butt out, ba—baby bro, it’s _my_ job to g—give _your_ significant others shit.”

Raleigh looks torn between touched and amused.  That makes two of them. “ _I_ don’t have significant _others_. I’ve only ever had significant _other_.”

Yancy rolls his eyes. “You know wh—what I mean, Raleigh. And I’m—I’m pretty sure it’s m—more of a fuck buddy situation right now.”

“Yeah,” Raleigh says. “For now.”

“Y—you sound sure.”

“I know you.”

Sometimes, for the two of them, it really is that simple.

 

The first time Alison stays over at the Beckets’ after that first weekend comes after a second weekend, on a Tuesday, and after Yancy finishes signing off on all the releases he has to do tonight, he kisses her on the cheek and heads off to bed. When she’s over, he shares with Raleigh.

Tonight, though, he reaches the end of the hall, opens the door, and goes, “Aw, fuck. C— _c’mon_ , Raleigh.”

She looks up at him standing in front of the door to his brother’s room with crossed arms. There’s silence from the darkened room.

“What?” she asks.

“He’s sprawled out over the whole _—the whole fucking bed_ ,” Yancy tells her.  “But he’s p—probably not actually asleep, he’s j—just being a dick.”

The room is still silent, Raleigh, if he’s awake, evidently not rising to the bait.

Yancy turns around and sighs and stumps back out to the living room.  “If he’s really asleep I d—don’t want to wake him, but _Jesus_. The k—kid could have better timing. I’ll t—take the couch or something when you g—go to bed.”

“Why don’t you just come to bed with me?”  When he hesitates, she raises an eyebrow.  “You’ve had your tongue in my vagina, Becket, don’t tell me sleeping next to me is too intimate for you.”

He laughs.

Down the end of the hall, Raleigh does too.

“I _knew_ it, you little shit!” Yancy yells down at him.

“Go to sleep, Yance,” Raleigh replies, still from his room.  “In your own bed.”

Yancy starts to get up off the sofa, probably to kick his little brother’s ass, but Alison has other ideas.  She pulls him back down next to her by the hip.  “Shh,” she tells him. “Go to sleep in your own bed. I’ll be in in half an hour.”

He still looks like he’s considering, but after a moment of that face, just as she starts to roll her eyes and opens her mouth to tell him she won’t lay a hand on him and he can put a line of pillows down the middle of the bed to protect his chastity if he wants, he leans over and kisses her nose, then gets up and heads for his own room.

“That was almost cute,” she says as he disappears.

“I was aiming for your mouth,” he admits.

By the time she comes in, he’s already dead asleep on the left side of the bed, snoring softly, chest rising and falling under his stupid, ratty Bud Lite shirt with his slow, deep breathing.  He’s left the lights on, considerate of her relative unfamiliarity with the room, but she shuts them off as soon as she’s gotten out of her work pants, changed out her shirt for one of Tendo’s, which is big on her, and scoped out the area to make sure there’s nothing to trip on in her way.

She kind of rolls into him when she gets into bed, but his only reaction is to mumble, “G’way, Rals,” and curl away from her.

The next morning she wakes up to his alarm, draped across his chest with no clear idea of how she got there.  His throat hums against the top of her head as he groans, flailing one arm out entirely unsuccessfully to smack his clock until it stops howling.  She helps him out, then rolls off him and stretches, yawning. “Rise and shine, Becket.”

“’ve had my tongue in your vagina,” he points out, voice hoarse from sleep but unbroken by his usual stammer. “Think you can call me Yancy. Can you hand me my pills?”

She watches him swallow them dry, then try to go back to sleep.  “Get up, sunshine,” she tells him, shaking his shoulder.  “You have a job you need to get to.”

“Nnno,” he moans, eyes still closed.

“You are such a baby. And your hair looks like a squirrel died on your head.”

“Fucking rude,” he says.

“Alison,” Raleigh says from the door, startling her out of smiling at his brother. She doesn’t even remember the last time he directly addressed her.  “Do you eat eggs?”

Well, she ate a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday, so she doesn’t see the harm in eating some chicken babies today.  “—yeah.”

“Okay.” He disappears, and she sincerely hopes they left the door open last night, because if not, Yancy needs to have a talk with his brother about boundaries.

“He likes you,” Yancy says, voice muffled.

He appears to be trying to smother himself with a pillow.

“Yeah?”

“He’s making you breakfast,” Yancy explains.

“He always makes me breakfast when I’m here.”

“No.” The pause after that is so long she thinks he’s gone back to sleep, but then he takes the pillow off his face and yawns.  “He just makes breakfast.” Alison wonders if this makes sense in Becket-ese or whatever these two speak.  ”He just asked you what you wanted in your omelet.”

“No, he didn’t,” Alison informs him.  “He asked if I eat eggs.”

“What do you want in your omelet,” Raleigh asks, appearing in the doorway again.  “Morning, Yance.”

She looks at Yancy, who is looking at his brother with bleary eyes, then answers.  “Um.  Whatever you have that isn’t meat, I guess.”

He nods, and then he’s gone again.

“That was creepy,” she tells Yancy, whose eyes are slipping closed again, referring to the _obvious_.

“What was?”

She rolls her eyes and takes his pillow away so she can hit him with it.  “Get _up_ , Yancy.”

 

Yancy graduates a class of exactly three kids to Ranger Ready, who will be doing basic gopher work until they either get matched up with someone and end up assigned to a Jaeger or get shunted sideways into being gophers for somebody else. Legal’s got a bunch of cadets around. So does the hospital.

He takes a picture of them and sends it to Tendo and Alison.

 _My little babies, all grown up_ , he says, under it.

 _youre such a dad becket_ , Alison replies.

 _does this mean you’re sending me some more kids? we need some more kids_ , Tendo says.

 _Yes, I am sending you two recently-graduated kids off the LOCCENT track_ , Yancy tells him.  _These three are mine, though._

_why would I even want ranger ready cadets?_

_Because they’re awesome_ , Yancy types, feeling indignant. _Don’t knock my kids, Choi._

 _such a fucking dad_ , Alison says.  _if those kids ever get jaegers youre going to be biting your nails and cheering at them from the sidelines like a 50yold mom at a 2 nd grade soccer game_

_I am merely proud of my accomplishments.  Stop belittling them._

He sends another picture.

 _Look how cute they are when they’re looking at the RR on their new uniforms_.

 _when me and alison have kids, I am going to send you fifty pictures of them a day to get even with you for this_ , is Tendo’s reply, after a long typing pause.

Alison doesn’t contradict him about the kids.

 _Aw_ , he says.

Neither of them reply.

 

Tendo calls Yancy every Thursday night, because why not.

Sometimes Alison joins him, sometimes she doesn’t.  She prefers texting.  So does Yancy, but there’s something personal about a call that Tendo likes. Call him old—Yancy does—but it’s just how he prefers to talk.  Faster, too. Sometimes Raleigh sits against Yancy’s shoulder during the call, but he doesn’t ever talk much, which Tendo knows drives his brother insane.

But after a while, they stop trying to engage him—he’ll engage if and when he wants to.

Yancy, talking about his job, is as animated as he used to be when he was telling stories about whatever happened at the bar last weekend.  Or at least he seems to be—although he still stammers, he appears to trip less over his words; his face is alight, his hands are moving.  He’s a good storyteller, always has been, and the Academy is a veritable goldmine of interesting stories.

He calls the cadets _my kids_ , which at first is something Tendo almost makes fun of, but then becomes something that makes him want to kiss his best friend.

Which, you know, sucks, because he’s on Kodiak Island.

“Jesus,” he says after Yancy has hung up in the middle of a story because of a call coming in from Pentecost.

“What?” Alison asks as he takes out his headphones and tosses the tablet aside, although she doesn’t look up from her papers, the reason she’d been out of the call.

“He’s fucking adorable,” Tendo answers helplessly, running a hand over his face and through his hair, which is down for the night already.

“No,” she says, voice dropping through several octaves to imitate Yancy’s, “That’s all my brother.”

Tendo groans. “Stop.  Not you.”

 

Alison has a call with her family—she doesn’t call them very often, because they’re busy and she’s busy and they don’t always approve of her lifestyle—and, as usual, for the benefit of Ethan, they turn on video and she signs as she talks, slowly because it’s hard to concentrate on doing the two at once.  His hearing isn’t totally gone yet, but it’s going, and a connection like this one just mucks up what little he can hear.

Tendo usually watches her hands in fascination like he’s trying to figure it out when she does it, but Yancy just flashes a grin and goes back to his book, which, today, appears to be trashy erotica.

When she gets off the call, he drops the book over his chest and signs, a little clumsily, _Is your family deaf?_

She suspects he isn’t good enough to get the sentence out better, but it’s still an interesting surprise, so she grins and signs back, _My little brother is deaf_.

Tendo is gaping at them. Yancy’s smile sharpens wickedly, then abruptly transforms into a purely angelic curve. “You two are going to be my nightmare until the end of time,” he whispers, covering his face with his hands for a moment.  “Please speak out loud.”

 _Ignore him_ , Alison signs.  _Don’t speak out loud._

It’s childish, but the look on Tendo’s face when they keep communicating nonverbally is worth it.

 

Here are some things Tendo learns about Alison after dating her for two years:

She can’t cook for shit, not because she can’t follow a recipe but because she gets distracted in the middle of following it and fucks something up, or just downright forgets about it.

She wants a tattoo, but she’s scared of the needles. That’s why she’s got her piercings; she’s been trying to work up to it since she was eighteen.  There’s a very small line of blue on the inside of one of her ankles where she tried to start her ink and got up and left instead of getting further into it.  But she knows exactly what she wants.  Has it all doodled out on a piece of paper somewhere.

She’s a vegan with no conviction—what he likes to call a _vegetarian_. Because she can’t keep away from macaroni and cheese for love or money, and every time she breaks on it she goes through a couple of weeks of unrepentant animal-product-consumption before returning to her veganism.

She’s much nicer than she likes to let on.

She’s not ticklish, unless you get her while she’s sleeping—then she wakes shrieking and trying to punch you.

She hates high heels and skirts, not because they’re feminine but because she’s terrible at balancing in heels and she’s used to living in the backwoods of Alaska, where half the year it’s stupid to wear anything that isn’t trousers and boots laced up to mid-shin.  But she loves mascara, because she thinks she has “tragically short” eyelashes.

Her favourite color is purple, but blue is a close second.

She can sing, and does, when she’s working and doesn’t realize she’s doing it.

She has a massive language kink.  Even though he doesn’t actually speak a word of Chinese, he can exploit it if he just—recites poems Yeye used to like in varying inflections.  And yeah, maybe he spent some time memorizing those hoping she wouldn’t notice. But it was so worth it for her reaction.

She likes doing dishes, thinks it’s calming.

And he kind of thinks he’s going to marry her.

 

Alison comes back to the Beckets’ from an exhausting ten hours at the launch facility, with a raging headache and budding homicidal urges.  She drops her bag unceremoniously on the floor as she walks in and hopes her company-issued phone breaks, throws her coat at the hook and rips the band out of her hair, massaging the bridge of her nose as she bends to untie her boots.

Yancy’s head, visible over the top of the couch, turns at the slam of the door, raising his eyebrows as he looks at her.  “Bad day?” he asks, as Raleigh’s head pops up next to him.

“Please tell me you keep alcohol in the house.”

Raleigh decides this is his cue to exit stage left, slipping down the hallway towards his room. “He’s not having a great d—day either,” Yancy tells her when he’s gone in a low voice.  “Tried to p—pick up a beam at work and his arm gave out on him.”

She doesn’t really care, and she’s not really sure why that would upset Raleigh so much, but she knows Yancy can’t stop himself from reporting on his little brother, so she just blows out an irritated breath and stalks into the kitchen.  “Where do you keep the wine?”

“In the cabinet over the stove—y—you won’t be able to reach; hang on.”  There’s a shuffling noise, and then the distinctive _clunk-clunk-clunk_ sound of Yancy walking barefoot, and he appears around the corner, reaching up to open the cabinet and then pausing. She makes a point of not complaining about the help because she doesn’t want to encourage his own tendency not to ask for things he needs and because he’s right, she wouldn’t have been able to reach without climbing up on the counter.  “Red or white?”

“On second thought, where do you keep your vodka?”

Yancy’s mouth twitches and he closes the cabinet.  “In the rotating c—cabinet on the bottom shelf.  He put it there so I wouldn’t be able t—to get at it without lying down on the floor.”

“Doesn’t mix well with your medications?”

He shakes his head, then studies her face.  “Head hurts?”

“You would not believe the day I’ve had,” she says in answer, splashing half a cup of vodka into a ball glass and replacing it in the cabinet as he leans against the counter next to the stove.

“There’s orange juice in the fridge,” he tells her, because he is an angel in disguise, she swears it. “What happened?”

“The idiot techs on my team set the mechanism wrong after we worked _all day_ on the setup and the test launch exploded.  Then I spent the rest of the day being chewed out by the higher-ups about wasting their money on simple mistakes.”  She growls quietly and replaces the orange juice, swirling the cocktail in her hand before she knocks back half of it.

“That’s not going to help your headache,” he points out to her as they move from the kitchen to the living room again.  She ignores him, and waits until he sits down so that she can situate herself in his lap. She cuddles when she’s irritated—Tendo thinks it’s hilarious, but Yancy hasn’t experienced it yet. Nevertheless, his arms go around her waist almost immediately.  “You know what w—will?”

“If you say ‘orgasms’ I will pour this over your head, Yancy Becket,” she says darkly.

He laughs. “Well, they always help mine, b—but for the sake of my hair, I guess I’ll just shut up.”

She reaches back to mess up his hair, because she’s feeling spiteful and he is an ass. “You’re a cliché.”

“I’m speaking from experience,” he protests. ”I get tension migraines.  It’s a good—good way to relieve tension.”

“I really don’t feel like having sex with you tonight,” she tells him, but all the acid in her tone is cancelled a little by how she leans back into his chest, sipping her drink now, “I have a headache.”

He laughs again. Then kisses her ear, careful not to catch any of the piercings as he pulls away.  “I was j—just offering to get you off, actually.”

“What, nothing in it for you?”

“I had kind of a shitty day too; my b—back was killing me.  Took Oxycontin, so it doesn’t hurt that much, but I probably couldn’t g—get it up in any kind of meaningful way if I—if I tried.”

“I’m on my period,” she says, mouth twitching a little.  She kind of just wants to see what he’ll come up for with this one. He knows exactly how fast she’s willing to say no if and when she really wants him to stop.

“Well, G—God gave me fingers for a reason,” he replies casually, and she almost spits out her mouthful of liquid because the laugh that overtakes her is so sudden.

“You don’t even believe in God,” she manages after she’s done carefully swallowing. ”Besides, he gave me fingers too.”

“Yeah, but this way you d—don’t have to do any of the work.”

She turns to look at him, and he’s grinning, and it’s sort of endearing, in a way that kind of makes her want to smack him.  She finds he provokes this urge in her more and more frequently these days. “Consider me convinced.” When he immediately reaches for the fastenings on her slacks, she stops him with a hand on his wrist. “Right _here_?”

“He’s not coming out of his room for at least an hour,” Yancy says, raising his voice so Raleigh can probably hear it easily at the end of the hall.

Now she just wants to smack him.

She also sort of wants to laugh, and in her conflict she lets him untuck her shirt and pull her back into his chest again.  “Relax,” he says quietly in her ear, rubbing a thumb around the white stone at her navel. “And tell me how you like it when you do it.”

“What do you mean? And don’t make me spill my drink or I will make you clean it up.”

“Put it down. You like fingers in, or w—will that just be boring?  How are we feeling about our nipples today?”

His hand is creeping down between her panties and her skin, slowly, using the slack given to him by her undone trousers.  He makes no further effort to undress her.  She’s distracted by it for a moment, but his last question makes her roll her eyes because it’s just— _stupid_.  “Do it hard and shallow, and I’m ambivalent to my nipples today, but do not pull on the piercings, I’m not in the mood.”

Then she puts down her glass, because, well.

“Okay,” he murmurs, mouth grazing her neck, and then kisses up her jugular to the spot behind her ear, reaching his free hand up her shirt to undo her bra with a practiced twist of the front clasp that tells her he’s had a lot of girls on his lap like this. “If this doesn’t work I can g—give you Ibuprofen and a scalp massage.”

The first stroke of his fingers makes her squirm, and he settles in easy to a rhythm that makes her push her hips forward to ride his hand, while he keeps her against his body with the hand toying with her left breast.  “Stop that,” he says eventually, the hand dropping to her hips to still her motion.  “Just let me do it. Don’t have to work for it.”

“A little deeper, then,” she says, voice rasping.

He complies, kissing under her jaw now.

Yancy draws it out until she gasps, “Oh, god damn you,” and by the time he’s lazily thumbing her clit as she shudders through her aftershocks, she’s gone boneless against him, head lying back on his shoulder as he mouths over her neck. “Stop,” she tells him, hand on his wrist again, and he obligingly does, pulling his fingers out carefully, like he’s trying not to get her any messier than she already is.

“You were lying about your period,” he says idly when his hand doesn’t come up bloody, but doesn’t seem too put out about it, just licks his fingers, which simultaneously seems somewhat disgusting to her and is _really hot_.

“And you were lying about your pills,” she replies, because she can feel him, hard, against the bottom of her thigh.

He exhales, long and slow, against her shoulder, eyes closed.  “Yeah, but that w—was all I wanted.  How’s your headache?”

“Better.” Marginally.  But she appreciates the orgasm anyway.

“Good. If you w—want to go take a nap or something, I’ll—I’ll bring in dinner when it’s ready.”

“I’ll just stay here,” she tells him, and tucks her head into the crook of his neck, feeling his jaw move as his smile spreads, light, across his face.

“Okay.”

 

When Tendo actually gets her the ring and asks her properly, she throws her arms around his neck and kisses him hard, and everybody in the restaurant starts cheering them on.

Yancy only knows this because Tendo had one of the waiters film it.

He shows the video to his brother, because it’s fucking adorable, and Raleigh wrinkles his nose. “Aren’t you, like, jealous, or anything?”

“Nah,” he says, and—maybe a little, sometimes, but not really.  He’s less jealous of one or the other of them and more of the relationship generally, because he doesn’t really have that with either of them. “They’re like—each other’s air and water, you know.  They n—need each other. I’m like… good food. Excellent but unnecessary.”

Raleigh punches him in the shoulder.  “Wow, write me a book, Yancy.  And stop putting yourself down.”

“I’m not,” he says, and he really isn’t trying to, there’s just no better way to say it than that. For all he knows Tendo and Alison love him, they don’t love him the same way they love each other and they probably never will.  He’s all right with that, because it’s not like he’s exactly in Mr. Darcy and Jane love with them either. What he’s got is good enough. “I’m gonna be b—best man.”

“And that’s not going to be weird?”

“What, because I’m dating the bride and groom?”

“…yes?”

“Nah,” he says again. “We’re big kids, we can handle it. I’m g—gonna write a killer toast and you’re going to help me—help me plan the bachelor party.”

Raleigh opens his mouth.

“Yes, you are coming.”

“What if they don’t invite—”

“They will, b—but if they didn’t then you could be my plus one, kiddo, you—you’re coming.”

Raleigh still looks like he doesn’t want to.

“C’mon, I need somebody t—to pass me tissues discreetly if I start crying.”

“If you start crying, I’m going to point it out to everyone in the room,” Raleigh says sweetly.

Yancy kicks him with his good leg.  “When _you_ get married I’m go—going to embarrass the fuck out of you during my toast.”

“Who says you get to be my best man?”

Yancy just looks at him.

Who else, really.

“Fair point.”

“I fucking thought so,” Yancy smirks, and knuckles the top of his brother’s head to make him squirm.

“When _you_ get married—”

“I’m not getting married,” Yancy tells him, and withdraws his hand to bat Raleigh’s away when he tries to retaliate.  “Not my thing.”

Raleigh glances at him, but drops it before he even starts.

Yancy is profoundly grateful.

 

“Dude, those pants make your ass look like it exists.  We should go with this one.”

“Are you trying to get my fiancée to kill me?” Tendo asks incredulously as Yancy takes a picture of him in the plaid suit and starts typing.  “You’re sending her a picture of this, aren’t you.”

Yancy had insisted on taking him suit shopping after he’d googled “best man duties”, despite the fact that he can buy a suit all by himself.  “Sure am.  I’m captioning it ‘This is the one.  Look at his butt.’ with no punctuation.”

Tendo shakes his head and starts shrugging out of the suit jacket.  “I am not wearing plaid to my wedding.”

“Sure you aren’t,” Yancy says smoothly, then laughs.  “She says, ‘What butt?’.”

“You idiots both _love_ my butt,” Tendo sniffs, dropping the suit pants.

“What little of it exists,” Yancy agrees, reaching down to palm it as he hands over the next suit. By now, Tendo is so used to his grabby hands that he doesn’t even flinch, just rolls his eyes.

“Hands off the goods, my man, we’re on a mission.”

Yancy raises his phone and snaps a selfie of the two of them; Tendo mostly undressed and looking amused and himself with a shit-eating grin.  Then he pulls away and starts typing again.  “What goods?”

“When I hit you, you had it coming.”

 

Yancy gives his toast, which involves a story that has the whole hall screaming with laughter, and which is definitely and entirely made up—Alison knows, because Tendo absolutely does not have a tramp stamp, much less one of her name.  But unless Tendo drops trou right now, he can’t prove it, and Yancy’s good enough at telling the story that even its subject gets sucked into it until the final act, where he starts kicking in with the really embarrassing shit, which is all so hilariously false Alison almost snorts champagne out her nose at her husband’s indignant protests.

They’ve picked a slow dance for the third song, in deference to Yancy’s disability, and when he cuts in on her father to sweep her away, the wicked grin he’s been holding on his face since his toast softens a little.  “Y—you look beautiful,” he tells her honestly, quietly.  The three of them are a secret and probably always will be, but for a moment the look on his face is so entirely obvious anyone who cared to see would notice.  As she watches, it morphs back into his sharp smile.  “Love the earrings.  R—really nice. Who got those for you?”

He did.

All five of them; two gold hoops with red stones to match her wedding ring, two little gold balls sitting directly above them, and a little cupid’s arrow poking through both of the holes in the upper cartilage of her right ear.  The nose stud is his too, a tiny flower with a little ruby at the centre, but he’d left her on her own for her eyebrow and lip piercings, probably for the same reason he’d refused to tell her how much the whole lot had cost him.

They’d been a surprise, and she’s still not sure why he’d gotten them, but she’d planned the rest of her jewelry around them and worn them today for him.

He’s being an ass, though, as usual, so, as usual, she rolls her eyes.  “I don’t know, Yancy, I forget.”

“Think your ball and chain is wearing my present too?” he asks casually, and she refrains with great difficulty from a snort that would almost certainly end up in some picture.  His present to Tendo had been plaid lingerie, “For your wedding night,” and the two of them had cried laughing.  She doesn’t get the joke, and frankly, doesn’t want to know.

“No,” she answers, and flicks his nose.

He just laughs. “Shame.  Have fun with him anyway.”

“You know I will.”

He kisses her hand as if he’s actually a gentleman and not the one asshole in the wedding party who’d “forgotten” his tie, and lets her back into Tendo’s arms as the song changes.

 

On the fourth day of their honeymoon, they call Yancy and then get each other off on camera for him.

Tendo makes noise more than he talks during sex, and Alison’s speech tends to be limited to instructions and suggestions, but Yancy has a filthy mouth on him and he shows it. He asks them what they’re doing, makes suggestions.  Tells them what he’d do if he were there.  Keeps flipping between them with his attention, which he’s gotten much better at since that first, awkward time.

It’s only after Alison is panting against her husband’s chest, getting her breath back, that the two of them realize he’s made no efforts to touch himself, and he isn’t hard, as far as they can see.  “You all right?” Tendo asks, somewhat breathless, gesturing vaguely towards the bottom of the screen.

Yancy doesn’t seem to get it for a moment, then he looks down.  “Oh. Yeah, no, I’m j—just on a lot of drugs right now, it’s fine.”

“That was sort of for your benefit,” Alison mumbles into Tendo’s shoulder.  “You could’ve mentioned your performance issues earlier.”

“If that was _really_ for my benefit you would have—have been talking to me a lot more,” Yancy points out.  “It’s cool, I like getting you guys off.”

Which is true. And he patently hates being in the middle, which they have proved over and over again until the point where they stopped even trying.  Tendo sighs. “Tell us next time, dude.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Yancy grins at them through the camera, the same way he usually does, like it’s easy.

He acts like everything’s always so simple to him.

Maybe it is.

“Love you guys,” he finishes, and waves.  “Now g—go bathe in the afterglow or something.  Have a good—good rest of your week.”

Then the screen goes black, and they look at each other and try to remember if he’s said that before.

 

Tendo wakes up sprawled over the centre of the bed, face pressed into the back of Yancy’s shoulder, and rolls away from him, yawning.  He knows that little movement has no chance of waking him, because Yancy Becket wakes up for exactly three things: alarm sirens, being smacked on the ass, and his little brother, not in that order.

They haven’t explored that second one, but it’s coming.

Yancy’s face-down on the bed, snoring into the space between the two pillows, and Alison is curled over his other side, one arm stuck under him.  Her eyes are open, and when he meets them, she tugs at her arm as if demonstrating that she cannot move it, probably because Yancy outweighs her by at least a hundred pounds, all things considered.  “Help,” she whispers.

Tendo laughs at her for about thirty seconds before he sits up and stretches, yawning, then grabs ahold of Yancy’s left side and rolls him over so she can have her hand back.

She pulls it back and shakes it like it’s gone dead, looking distressed, and Yancy mumbles, “F’ck off, Raleigh,” and rolls back over.

“He’s hilarious,” Tendo says, pointing to Yancy like he could possibly mean any other “he.”

“He’s _heavy_ ,” she replies.

They look at him. His head is shoved into the pillow now, arms holding it against his face, and his shirt has ridden up to reveal a narrow strip of his lower back.  The angry edges of the graft scars show on his right side, and there’s a thin white line over his spine where Alison knows they opened him to put the spinal reinforcements in.

Tendo traces his thumb over that scar, and Yancy doesn’t react.

“Wish he’d let us take his shirt off,” Alison says idly, and rolls onto her back, sighing.

“We got time,” Tendo replies, and shrugs.

The three of them don’t fight.

Sometimes Tendo and Alison get into an argument, and sometimes Alison gets fed up with Yancy being an idiot and tells him he’s an idiot.  But it’s hard to fight with Yancy, because he doesn’t really fight back, usually just talks it out, so the three of them don’t fight.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t some shit they don’t talk about that they probably should.

This is one of those things.

 

“Ever gotten fucked, Becket?”

“Yep,” Yancy says, and turns a page in his book, looking up when they fall silent, surprised. “What?  Strapons exist.”

“I’m just surprised you ever used one,” Alison tells him, but shrugs.  “Want to try it again?”

“Raleigh likes it, I figured I should gi—give it a try,” Yancy replies, returning to his book, and doesn’t seem to notice when both of them grimace at that. “I can’t say it was really my thing, but sure, why not.”

“If you don’t want to—”

“Hey, I’ll—”

“—try anything twice,” Alison and Tendo chorus, and Alison hits him in the face with a pillow. “You’re so predictable, Yancy.”

“And yet you were surprised I’d ever had anything up my ass,” he scoffs.

“You’ve been having sex semi-regularly with me for like… almost five years, and you still won’t admit you like guys,” Tendo points out.  “You’re hanging on pretty hard to your imaginary dude card.”

“One,” Yancy tells him, holding up one finger, “You’re my gay exception, you should feel honoured, and—and two, getting fucked has nothing to do with me being a dude and you know it.”

“Whatever, Captain Heterosexual,” Alison says, shutting them both up.  “Your ass is on tap tonight.”

“Great,” Yancy says, goes back to his book.

He doesn’t seem particularly excited, but by the time Alison is three fingers deep in him, he’s blushing so hard the colour has crept down under his collar, has his face turned into the sheets so they can’t see his expression.  “You good?” Alison asks him, and he makes an unintelligible noise. “If I knew it was this easy to shut you up we’d have done this forever ago,” she says after a moment where he doesn’t talk.  “But I need you to tell me if you’re good or not.”

“I—I’m fine,” he grits out. “Would you f—fucking finish that? Your nails are ma—making me nervous.”

Well, _something’s_ making him nervous, but she doubts it’s her nails.

But she trusts him to tell her if something’s wrong, so they go ahead.  At Tendo’s first push in, he breathes out harshly, but other than that, he’s pretty quiet, for once in his fucking life.   “Sit on my face,” he manages after a minute or two, voice strained, and yeah, actually, now that she thinks about it, despite the fact that it’s about the only position that works for him, he’s never much liked being on his back without something distracting him from looking at himself.

“Sit on your face, what?” Alison says, because she feels like being mean to him, even though she knows she’s going to give him what he wants.

He scrubs a hand over his eyes, the muscles in his stomach visibly tensing under his shirt. “Sit on my face, _please_?” he answers obligingly.

Obligingly, she straddles his neck and lets him put his hands on her hips and pull her up until her thighs are wrapped around his head and his tongue presses forwards to lick broadly across her, the way he always does before he starts doing anything of any particular aim. She pets across his hair until she loses her concentration and just starts grinding off against his chin and the ridge of his nose.

He’s louder when all his noise is muffled.

When all three of them are done, she shakily dismounts, kisses him where his lips are shining and swollen, lets him pant quietly into her mouth as they come down together.

Tendo’s hands come to her hips as his body slots up behind her, kissing her shoulders.

 

It’s Saturday night and Yancy is still sore from his physical therapy, but that doesn’t stop him from being obscenely cuddly the second Tendo gets into bed, reaching out to grab his hips and pull him backwards into his body, wrapping arms around his waist and laying kisses across the back of his neck.  “Your hair looks stupid with that much gel in it,” he murmurs, “I’m g—gonna have to mess it up.”

“You love my hair.”

Yancy hums into the back of his neck, lazily pushing his hips against the small of Tendo’s back without any real intent.  “Yeah.”

They’re not all sex, the three of them, but when Yancy’s around so little, they tend to spend a lot of time on the two weekends a month that they have together in bed.

Yancy’s getting better, he thinks, about not apologizing about the fact that he has a repertoire of exactly two positions now and sometimes can’t do anything at all but watch because he can’t get it up past the pain or the drugs.

He’s thinking, too, about taking his shirt off sometime, because they really seem to want him to, and he sort of hates always keeping it on—just not as much as he hates the idea of having to look at his scars.  At having them able to look at his scars.

Maybe he’ll just try it, sometime.

“Hey,” Tendo says, and Yancy looks up from where he’s starting to set his teeth into his neck, fingers turning circles into his hips, starting to slip under the line of his belt, and freezes.

Alison is wearing the white button-down he came here in, unbuttoned and far too large on her petite frame, and under it, she’s wearing lacy red underwear, and he is suddenly extremely ready to have her in bed.  He’s aware he’s gaping when Tendo laughs.  “Oh my god, Yancy—Alison, c’mere, he just got rock-solid.  You were totally not kidding about those panties you got me before the wedding, were you?”

He was _totally_ not, now he thinks about it.

“She’s wearing my shirt,” he whispers.

“You are _so_ easy,” Alison tells him as she crawls onto the bed.

“You’re wearing my shirt,” he says again, and knows he’s a little breathless.  “I’m going to take your panties off with my _teeth_.”

Alison is laughing now, too.

“We really don’t do your weird things often enough, do we.”

“He’s not even stammering,” Tendo says, and Yancy pinches him.

“Dude, I’m going to fuck your wife.”

The Chois laugh, despite the fact that he is deadly serious.

“I’m so not k—kidding.”

“Of course you aren’t, honey,” Alison says, patronizing—probably intentionally—as she leans over to kiss Tendo.  “I take it the baby bump isn’t totally disgusting.”

“You’re not even showing,” Tendo points out, and Yancy rolls his eyes.

“Do I _really_ look like I would c—care if you were?”

 

Alison has to remove her navel piercing in month six, and is extremely put-out about it, but Tendo distracts her by talking about baby names and constantly having his hands on her.

He becomes very easy to push around, and she takes vicious advantage of it.

He’ll do the shopping if she tells him she has cravings, says it’s more efficient.  He paints the guest room and buys baby furniture because she claims she’s nesting.  He buys about fifteen baby books without her ever having to do anything, he’s just a little bit anal retentive that way.  Puts up with her family occasionally cycling through the apartment to see her with grace.

“Mm,” she tells him, “You’re going to be such a good daddy.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Tendo says.  “I have definitely had too many people call me that to want my kid saying it, ever.”

Alison can’t help but laugh and lean back into his shoulder.  “ _Wow_.”

“No shame zone, remember?”

“You ruined ‘daddy’ for my baby.”

“ _I_ did not,” Tendo corrects her.

“Ugh,” she says anyway, and pulls him forwards to kiss her.  “You’re such a skeeze.”

 

Alison gives birth and Tendo sends him fifty fucking pictures, just like he promised, and some of them are going to get them both killed later, because they’re of Alison’s face all screwed up in pain and sweaty.

“Raleigh!” he says when he gets home, jogging into the living room and tumbling over the back of the couch onto his brother’s lap where he’s lying across the couch, knocking the breath out of him.  “Alison had the baby.”

“Oh my god, Yance, get off,” Raleigh wheezes, and shoves him away.  “Show me the pictures.”

Yancy does. “Look how fucking cute he is,” he says, even though the baby is red and squashed-looking and not really cute at all.

“He’s not cute at all,” Raleigh says, puzzled.

“Dude, shut up.”

“He’s not,” Raleigh insists, “He looks like a squished tomato—”

He does.

He looks exactly like a squished tomato.

But Tendo’s spelling half his words wrong and he keeps going _look at him yancy look at him_ and so Yancy obeys.  “P—please just agree with me that the baby is adorable, kid.”

“The baby’s adorable, kid,” Raleigh parrots back, and Yancy shoves his head into the pillow.

“I held _you_ when you were that big.”

“You don’t even remember that, dickhead.”

“Nah, but I have pictures to prove it hap—happened.”

The next picture is a birth certificate that says _Gabriel Choi_ on it.  “I see they elected to forgo middle names,” Raleigh says when he shoves his phone in his face.

“I convinced them.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I told them yours.” Raleigh punches him in the arm. Hard.  “Ow,” he says, wounded.

“Gabriel. Gabe,” Raleigh says thoughtfully, apparently considering him appropriately chastised.  “It’s kind of nice.  Goes with Choi okay.”

“I know,” Yancy replies, grinning, and his brother looks sideways at him.

“—you’re all good with this, then, huh?”

Yancy pauses a moment, then grins again.  “’course I am. After ta—taking care of _you_ for three years I don’t want anything to do with children unless I g—get to give them back to their parents at the—at the end of the night.”

Raleigh studies his face for a moment, and, apparently not seeing a lie on it, subsides. “That sucks for you, because I’m totally adopting some in like, ten years.”

Yancy privately thinks that Raleigh needs to get his shit together on talking to people who aren’t his older brother if he wants kids in ten years, but then, ten years is a long time, when you’re twenty-four.  And—frankly, Yancy hasn’t had living apart from Raleigh in his life plan since he was eighteen, so if the kid’s ever adopting, he guesses he always assumed he’d be there complaining about it the whole way.

And this is just too heavy of a train of thought for Gabriel Choi’s birthday.

“And where are y—you going to get the money for that, Bob the Builder?”

“I was just kidding,” Raleigh says, withdrawing a little, and Yancy knows he’s misstepped. “Not raising kids without two parents. Just a joke.”

“Hey,” he says, reaching over to ruffle Raleigh’s hair.  “Wh—who’s to say you won’t have the other parent in, like, ten years?”

But his brother’s gone all quiet again.

Poor kid.

 

“Yancy,” Tendo says over the phone on a Thursday night, like always.  “I am on my knees begging here for a favour.”

“Sounds like a good start to an evening,” Yancy drawls.

“Please watch Gabe from Saturday to Sunday the next time you come out so Alison and I can go out and get a hotel room or something.  I cannot handle another sleepless night.  I’ll do anything, man.”

Yancy laughs, shrugs one shoulder.  “Getting a hotel r—room to _sleep_ in? _Lame_.  You’re getting old.”

“Please,” Tendo pleads, and actually, he does look exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, hair a little bit sticking up on one side, a change from his usual flawless arrangement. His bow tie is crooked. “I’ll sell you my soul. Suck yours out through your dick, anything.”

“You know, a simple please would have sufficed,” Yancy says idly.  “I w—was gonna do it as soon as you asked.”

“I _love_ you,” Tendo tells him, sounding so relieved Yancy actually feels a little sorry for him.  “God bless you and save you or whatever you heathens say.”

When he gets there on Saturday after his various therapies, Tendo is putting out a cigarette, and Yancy’s eyes narrow on it even as Alison kisses him hello.  “You’re still doing that shit?”

“We’re backing him off them,” Alison explains, trying to calm him, but he won’t just drop this one.

“Go cold turkey,” he says, voice hard.  “Unless you feel like dying or killing him.”

Tendo flinches, face going blank, and the two of them look each other dead in the eyes for a long moment before Alison gets in between them.  “You know I’m not going to—” he starts, but his wife sticks two fingers in his mouth to get him to shut up, far more effective than a hand over his lips.

“F—fucking _coffin na—nails_ ,” Yancy says, before she quiets him too, although he tries to keep talking around her fingers, stopping just short of biting her, careful with his teeth.

“Both of you shut up,” she orders, and they do, going still, because when she talks to them like that, they listen.  “You,” she turns to Yancy, “He’s trying.  Don’t be a dick because you have a personal vendetta against cigarettes.  And you,” now she’s looking at her husband, “We’ll talk about going cold turkey later.  For now, I am going to get some fucking sleep and Yancy is going to make sure our son eats and sleeps at least a little and you are going to take me out to get something to eat that neither of us made or ordered out.”

She removes her hands from their mouths, and neither of them speak, until they both do, in unison. “Okay.”

Then Tendo and Alison are gone, both of them kissing his cheeks on the way out, although Tendo is somewhat stiff about it.

When they come back the next morning, Yancy is asleep on the couch with the baby slung over his shoulder, head bent back over the backboard.  Gabe coos quietly, squirming, and he doesn’t wake, so Tendo pulls out his phone and starts snapping pictures.

The moment he’s done, Alison picks her son up out of Yancy’s arms, and that wakes him up, a little, at least—one blue eye slips open, a hand coming up to run through his hair, and then he shoots upright, words slurred when they come out. “ _Fuck_ , where’s the baby.”

Alison bursts out laughing, and Gabe starts crying.

“I got all of that on film,” Tendo says, triumphantly, as Yancy, seeing the kid in his mother’s arms, settles back, hand over his heart like he’s just felt it stop. “And I am putting it on the internet.”

“I’ll kill you, Choi,” he threatens.

“You don’t even know which way is up right now.”

Yancy groans, and his head falls back again.

 

“I’m shipping out to the Hong Kong Shatterdome,” Tendo tells Alison when he gets the news that Anchorage is closing.  Gabe is four months old. “Icebox is shutting down. Academy is, too, but they’re still on until this cycle graduates.  About six more months.”

“Yancy isn’t going to take that well,” she says, shifting the baby in her arms.  “I can’t leave my job unless I quit, and I’m not quitting.”

“What’re we going to do, then?” Tendo asks, after a long while.

“We go long-distance,” Alison tells him, simply.  “Internet in China is bad, but you can call when they don’t have you doing things.”

“Yeah,” he says, voice quiet.

“You’re going to miss his babbling stage,” she adds, thoughtfully.  “And when he laughs for the first time.  And when he starts crawling.”

Tendo clamps his jaw tight shut around saying anything like _don’t remind me_ , because he needs to be reminded of what he’ll be missing.  “Fucking kaiju,” he says quietly, and kisses her ear.

“Fucking apocalypse,” she replies, and then says, “Watch your language around my son.”

“But you just—”

“Shh,” she says, “I think he’s asleep.”

Tendo rests his chin on his wife’s shoulder and looks down at their son and tries and fails not to resent the PPDC a little for taking this from him.

 

Two days after Pitfall is when Yancy catches him around the waist and shoves him into an empty closet to kiss him breathless, a process made much less hot and much more hilarious because he’s still hobbling around on crutches, one pants leg pinned up to keep it out of the way, and he has to hop in clumsily and shut the door behind them with one hand.

By now, though, he knows better to laugh.

It’s kind of hard to laugh with someone’s tongue in your mouth, anyway.

 

Alison surprises them both by showing up in Hong Kong on Valentines’ Day—not that any of them really care about Valentines’ Day particularly, but Tendo hasn’t seen her in person in almost eight months now, so it comes as a surprise to no one, especially not Yancy, when the two of them retreat immediately to quarters with Gabe, probably to see if they can make him laugh so Tendo can see it in person.

Yancy’s leaving for Sydney with the newly minted Marshal next week.

He doesn’t begrudge them their alone time, but he has to admit, it’s kind of lonely around the ‘dome without any of the Rangers left, Raleigh and Mako holed up together somewhere probably talking their cute little hearts out, Herc locked in his office, and the rest of them dead.

Yancy thinks the phrase _the Lone Ranger_ and almost cries laughing at his own joke.

It’s just a waiting game, though, because Raleigh never really leaves him alone for long, and Alison and Tendo might be more each other’s than either of them is his, but they never make him sit out for any real length of time, when all three of them are in one place.  And yeah, sure enough, February the 17th lands him in their quarters, with one of them draped over each shoulder and Gabriel crawling between their laps, cooing unintelligible words and nonsense sounds.  He doesn’t have a hand free to keep the kid from falling off the edge of his knees, but Alison and Tendo both do, so they’re operating as one large person, one arm each to make sure their son is safe. 

This is about the only way Yancy’s ever okay with being in between them.  “Think we can fit three adults in two beds each made for about half an adult?” Tendo says after a while.

“Not if you want to do anything particularly athletic,” Alison replies.

“Where would you put the baby if he did?” Yancy points out.  “P—pretty sure I’m not up to anything athletic anyway.”

“He’s so high right now, you have no idea,” Tendo explains.

“I have been much higher,” Yancy informs him primly.  “And I actually meant I was tired, but thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ll watch Gabe if you two want to canoodle.”

“’Canoodle’? Really?”

“Nope,” Alison says, and turns her face into his shoulder.  “We’re just going to sleep.”

Yancy changes in the bathroom while she puts Gabe down, which is his usual routine—go into the bathroom, take off his leg, change clothes so he never has to actually get naked. This time, though, he hesitates, then pulls off the sleep shirt that probably belongs to a pair of pajama bottoms that Raleigh wears, because they’re thrifty like that.

Comes out on his crutches, wearing boxers, bare-chested.

Feels a little sick to his stomach, but pushes past it.  Neither of them say anything when he climbs into bed, leaning his crutches against the side of the frame, and fuck, he’s thankful for that, because his torso is an angry mess of scars and ugly marks and he doesn’t want to have to say anything about it.

When he glances down and sees the brand his dog tags gave him, he wants to throw up a little, but Alison lays her hand over his chest, covering the imprint with her fingers like she knows what he’s thinking.

He settles.

Thanks god sleep almost always comes easy for him.

 

Tendo drags the two of them through the Bone Slums the day before Yancy leaves, to a shitty little restaurant in the ass of nowhere, and none of them are famous enough these days to be recognized, although Yancy pulls a baseball cap low over his eyes just in case he looks enough like Raleigh to cause a stir.  Or in case there are some Gipsy groupies hanging around who know all three of her pilots, not just the two important ones—Yancy’s words, not hers.

They manage to escape recognition for a few hours, although Alison isn’t sure, with all the Cantonese flying around, that they would actually know if someone figured them out.

Tendo’s been here the longest, he knows the city best, so he’s leading—and it’s not like they ever go on dates, because they don’t want that kind of media circus, but this is about as close as it gets.  Yancy never actually dated, not publicly, even before Knifehead, so it’s not odd that he doesn’t now, and he was always so patently straight for the media that really, the three of them going out now has never even raised eyebrows, as long as they’re not too obvious.

Alison’s not sure this time what either of them give her, even though before, she’d always known—Martin was the serious one, Tendo was fun.  Et cetera, ad infinitum.

She’s not really sure anymore.

She finds she doesn’t mind it.

They end up recognized when they walk back out onto the streets, but funnily enough, Yancy passes muster without a hitch, while Tendo gets recognized from one of the preliminary newscasts right after Pitfall.  Still, he vanishes from their sides until they extricate themselves, and he joins them again a little further down the street.  “It’s the cane,” Yancy says, and waves it.  “They don’t expect me to have the cane.”  Mako’s just gotten his prosthetic back in working order, so his balance is a little shaky.

“Yeah, ‘gentleman’ isn’t really in your repertoire, Cap,” Tendo says, rolling his eyes.

“He’s wearing a Yankees hat,” Alison scoffs, “What about that makes you think anyone would view the cane as gentlemanly right now?”

“Red Sox fan, huh,” Yancy grins, tapping her knee with the cane.  “There’s no accounting for taste.”

“I know, I chose to date you for some reason.  Do you even watch baseball?”

“Nope. Raleigh bought me this when I was—was sixteen because it’s what my name means.”

“So you’ve had that for like, twenty years now?”

Yancy elbows her. “I’m totally not putting out tonight.”

“That’s what _he’s_ for,” Alison says easily, and leans into her husband’s side.  Tendo sticks his tongue out.

Yancy’s pout is downright adorable.

 

They kiss him goodbye, one after the other, in the hallway before he walks across the tarmac to the plane that’s waiting.

Raleigh’s the only one there to see, probably because he’s conveniently blocking the door so that no one can come in behind them.

Yancy ruffles his hair as a thank you, then steps out into the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> there were two parts that didn't make the cut because i didn't know where to put them.
> 
> one of them was basically a list of yancy's quirks.
> 
> the other one was him faking being able to talk dirty in french and getting caught.
> 
> i miss that second one.
> 
> whatever no one cares


End file.
